The figure of Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one of the most powerful images in the Christian tradition. If Jesus is the image of a human being bearing the Christ into the world, then Mary is the image of a human being bringing forth the Christ-bearer into the world. This makes Mary quite central to the Christ Event. A male-dominated Christian tradition had some trouble coping with such a powerful female image, and so efforts were made to put some boundaries around Mary to, well, keep her in her place, one might say.
In Roman Catholicism, this meant imbuing Mary with a superhuman sort of purity that no actual woman could ever achieve. The Roman tradition ultimately went so far as creating the doctrine of the immacluate conception, to remove Mary from the ordinary chain of human begetting. And while the Christian East rejected that idea, both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism felt the need to transform the brothers and sisters of Jesus into Mary's step-children in order to be able to say that she never had sex -- as this would compromise the superhuman standard of purity that they felt the need to set for her.
While Protestantism for the most part rejected these innovations and tortured interpretations of biblical texts (which clearly speak of Jesus as having brothers and sisters), the Protestant movement nevertheless still felt the need to put Mary in her place -- by jettisoning all the traditions that had arisen regarding her veneration (Protestantism never having comprehended the difference between veneration -- the honoring of someone -- and worship -- the kind of reverence reserved for God), and ensuring that she had no place in the liturgical life of Protestant churches.
The season of Advent is a good opportunity to recover Mary as a powerful sacred figure. One of the oldest titles used for her is that of Theotokos, a Greek word meaning God-Bearer. The roots of the title lie in the theological notion that equates Jesus as the Christ with God. Therefore, Mary -- as the mother of Jesus, the one who bore him into the world -- as the bearer of the Christ is the birth-giver of God into the world in the particular incarnation that is Jesus.
And it is here that the power of Mary as a sacred figure is to be found. For she becomes the prototype for all human beings. For each of us is meant to be a theotokos -- a God-bearer.
The deep mystery of the Christ Event is that it did not simply unfold in Jesus, but that it unfolds again and again in each of us (see my reflection on the gospel for the First Sunday of Advent). Each of us is to bring forth the Christ that is in us, to give birth, if you will, to the Christ in the shape of our own lives.
The divine dwells in each of us both potentially and actually. When we contemplate the seed of the divine that lies within us, we realize our kinship with Mary as the bearer of the divine. When we contemplate the way in which that divine seed actually breaks open in our lives so that the divine light becomes visible in us, we realize our kinship to the Christ.
The figures of both Mary and Jesus are central to those of us who make our spiritual pilgrimage within the Christian tradition. We are, each of us, both incubators of divine possibility and, when we are aligned with the Spirit, the ones who make that divine possibility concrete in the world. Advent is a season to contemplate our own divine potential, and Christmas is a season to contemplate we allow (or don't allow) that potential to be actualized.
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